Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Zsolt K. Virágos: The Twilight Zone of Myth-and-Literature Studies: Analogy, Anomaly, and Intertextuality

Yet the myths these similar segments are torn from have very different endings and they point to different interpretive options. Of the mythological heroes mentioned above, only two attain a blissful final end. Heracles is received into Olympus as the son of Zeus; Perseus and Andromeda, Ovid reports, live happily ever after. The other four are not so lucky. Unmerited suffering plagues the House of Cadmus, and Cadmus himself is trapped in a pattern that brings him an end which turns out to be far from heroic: he is changed into a snake before dying. Oedipus blinds himself and goes into exile. Bellerophon dies lame and cursed by the gods for his hubris and presumption. St. George's subsequent life brings him much suffering and he dies a martyr's death; the reward is spiritual. Most of these mythological personages are by now safely embalmed in primordial configurations and they have served as original models for countless analogous incarnations in the subsequent evolution of culture, including the literary culture. The exemplary stories in which they figure have spawned a vast array of archetypal and paradigmatic alternatives, thus generating a whole spate of close cousins in the literatures of the past centuries. The archetypal career of the hero has thus become a formal pattern historically abstracted from the life cycles of mythological prototypes such as Perseus, Bellerophon. Heracles, Jason, Theseus, Meleager, Orpheus, Prometheus, Moses, etc. and has come to serve as a congenial nodal point and time-embalmed receptacle. As such, the paradigm of the hero has become ready to accommodate subsequent archetypal characters, also displaying in the process a gradual shift from the purely mythological to the literary, including, more recently, a new gallery of protagonists in popular culture. This metamorphic transition can be well traced even in a loose and skeletal sequence ranging from Achilles and Aeneas via Beowulf, Arthur and Roland to Hamlet and ivanhoe down to the "superheroes" of contemporary, often escapist, mass culture. As regards this last, popular cultural, stage within the American frame of reference, it will be instructive to quote from the blurb of Jewett and Lawrence's monographic study on the American monomyth: The American monomyth finds Captain Kirk and Mr. Spöck of "Star Trek" saving various stellar communities from horrible dangers. 278